Sunday, June 26, 2016

The first wild strawberries appeared this week, and
ripe blueberries are only a few weeks off. Blackberries and raspberries have been
flowering in profusion, suggesting it may be a great berry year for them. Get
out the pails.

Water water water. What
began as a dry spring has turned into a surprisingly wet early summer. The
Manitowish River is in full flood below our house, and most other area rivers
and lakes have high water as well.

Pine
pollen coated water surfaces just about everywhere in the last week, and now
the male pollen cones are falling by the tens of thousands, giving the ground a
reddish cast.

Porcupine Angler?

Beth Huizenga in Presque Isle sent
me a photograph of a porcupine appearing to be fishing from her pier, a
behavior seemingly impossible for porcupines given that they are herbivores.

photo by Beth Huizenga

Still,
I’ve learned to “never say never.” So, I researched the diet of porkies and
found that their diet varies seasonally. In spring and summer, the adaptive porcupine
consumes various grasses, leaves, flowers, herbs and raspberry canes. In the
autumn and winter, their diet is restricted to acorns and other nuts, the phloem
and cambium layer of trees, and the foliage of conifers.

But porcupines are perpetually starved of sodium due to a nutritional
imbalance, so they also utilize a variety of sources to obtain concentrated
amounts of sodium. This includes aquatic plants such as yellow pond lily and
arrowhead, both of which contain high levels of sodium. Invertebrates like beetles,
ants, and the larvae of of some insects have also been found in the stomach
contents of porcupines, but they may be consumed incidentally with vegetation.
Still, invertebrates contain relatively high amounts of sodium, so who knows
what is purposeful or accidental in the mind of a porkie. Porkies are also
known to gnaw on deer bones, likely because bone contains sodium.

I can’t find any records of porkies catching and eating fish, so I
suspect the porcupine in Beth’s photo was hoping to consume an aquatic plant,
not a fish. But one thing I’ve learned again and again is that animals are
opportunistic, often highly adaptable, and they don’t read scientific journals.
Who knows? Beth’s porkie may be the first angling porcupine ever recorded.

Nachusa Grasslands

Mary, Callie, and I were
in northern Illinois last week – Mary taking part in a workshop/conference,
Callie visiting a friend, and me . . . well, I took my bike and explored all
the bike trails I could find. But on our way home, we stopped briefly at the
Nachusa Grasslands just north of Franklin Grove where bison roam wild on over
3,000 acres of Nature Conservancy Land.

This is a huge deal on two counts. Nearly 60 percent of Illinois, about
22 million acres, once was prairie. But over the last two centuries, farms
consumed nearly all of it, leaving only 2,500 acres of prairie in Illinois. The
Nachusa grasslands have doubled that number.

photo from The Nature Conservancy

Upward of 60 million bison once roamed North America, but sport hunting
and mass slaughter dropped that number to fewer than 1,000 by 1906. Aggressive
conservation efforts have brought the bison population up to 450,000, but the
vast majority of bison are domestic livestock – fewer than 20,000 roam freely.
These Nachusa bison are prairie survivors and saviors, not livestock. It’s
essential to note that the Nachusa bison have not been interbred with other
species, remaining genetically pure, and thus truly wild.

Better yet, in 2015,Nachusa Grassland’s first bison calf was born,
the first wild bison born on native
Illinois prairie, and the first west of the Mississippi, in almost 200 years.

The Nachusa story began when The Nature Conservancy sought large tracts
of grasslands untouched by plows, acquiring its first 400 acres in 1986. Buying
land was just the first step. Volunteers and staff conducted the prairie
restoration. People worked hundreds of thousands of hours — an estimated
450,000 — at the preserve, including years of harvesting native plant seeds.

The bison herd now numbers 45 and roams across thousands of acres of
rolling land. The long-term vision is for about 100 bison to be grazing
throughout an ever-expanding Nachusa.

If you ever visit, know that they’re often not visible over such a large
area. We were fortunate to see two, and that was enough for us.

Prairie flowers were also ubiquitous – the preserve is home to 700
native plant species and has had 180 species of birds utilize its grasslands.

Center
for Conservation Leadership

Last weekend I accompanied 16 youth from the
Chicago area on a paddle down the Manitowish River. Representing an array of
nationalities, they were a wonderful group of very bright and motivated young
people selected to be part of the Center for Conservation Leadership (CCL), an
educational initiative of the Lake Forest Open Lands Association, a nationally
recognized and accredited land trust.

The students travel with staff to northern Wisconsin for three weeks of hiking,
canoeing and kayaking through the region, learning about conservation,
developing leadership skills, and working together as a team to become stewards
of natural resources on a local, regional, national and global level. Their
first week is spent at the North Lakeland Discovery Center, and culminates in a
three-day camping trip, this year on the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage.

In the third week, the students will apply their newfound knowledge and understandings
as they explore issues of environmental justice with tribal leaders, citizen
action groups and professors who are doing cutting edge research in
conservation and the environment.

It’s a great program, and it reinforces how exceptional our youth can
be.

Loon Wars

I regularly read Walter Pipers blog “The Loon Project” (https://loonproject.org ), and in his
most recent posting, he describes the brutal usurping of the older territorial
male on Blue Lake by an aggressive four-year-old male. That apparently was
tough enough to watch, but what followed was harder: “The strategic retreat of
the territorial male left his mate in dire straits. Without another
parent to engage intruders, the female alone had to defend
the week-old chick from the aggressive onslaught of the four-year-old
male. The situation was hopeless, the suspense only fleeting. The young
male quickly discovered the chick and – in the grisliest moment we have observed while
studying loons – snatched the chick out of the water and carried it for a time
while pursuing the retreating female. When he dropped the lifeless
youngster, it was over.”

Walter further noted that “intruding loons are adept at sniffing
out weakness in territorial residents. When a breeding male or
female is unable to drive competitors forcefully off of
the lake, intruders congregate, leading to further confusion and attempted
evictions, in a disheartening positive feedback cycle. The Blue-Southeast male,
while a capable parent, has often encountered intruding males that he could not
drive off of the territory in years past. It is quite possible that his
troubles in 2015 occasioned more territorial challenges in 2016 by
the same set of challengers.”

The biological good news in this is that the new
stronger male will likely defend the territory with greater success than his
predecessor and will pass on those genes. However, it’s a very hard business to
watch – the heart and the mind often don’t see things in the same light.

Independence Day –
Bird Style

While we celebrate on July 4th, a day sometime later in July
will also mark independence day for bald eagle chicks. In the build-up to their
first flight, they’re practicing, flapping their wings as they run across their
nest and onto adjacent limbs, jumping up and down, all in an effort to develop
muscle strength, flight coordination, and landing ability. Despite all their
practice, up to half of first flights will end unsuccessfully with the young sometimes
remaining on the ground for weeks and crying rather piteously. Parents usually continue
to feed these young until they regain their flight ability, but the grounded
birds are vulnerable to predators in the meantime.

The chicks attempt to fledge anywhere from 8 to14 weeks
of age. The problem is that while the fledglings may desire their independence,
they rarely are competent enough to catch live prey during their first six
weeks of fledged life and end up having to rely on the adults to bring them
food. The fledglings develop their hunting skill by trial and error, usually first
by scavenging dead fish either along shorelines or by picking up floating dead
fish.

So, as with most first departures from home, there
can be some rough patches and a need for support. Independence isn’t gained
simply by leaving home, but rather by gaining the skills required to be on
one’s own. Which brings me to:

Thought
for the Day: There’s No Such Thing as Independence

The
notion that any of us are independent ignores all the people who make our lives
possible. Begin with the fact that the food we eat was raised by someone. Raise
your own, and you’re still using tools made for you by someone. Make your own
tools, and you’re still dependent on the miner and the factory worker to make
your steel. Your clothes, your home, your energy sources – all are brought to
you by communities of people.

Even
if a few of us were to find ways to do all of these things on our own, we are
dependent upon rain, upon soil, upon trees, upon the Earth to supply all the
materials we may use.

So,
while I know Independence Day is about commemorating the adoption of the
Declaration of Independence, I wonder if we add an additional “Interdependence
Day” or “Reciprocation Day.” That’s the reality of our lives – we live based
almost entirely on work done by others for which we exchange work of our own.
We are a community of beings – human, plant, animal, and a host of others –
that need to be living in harmony between one another. For my two cents, that
goal would equally worth all the fireworks.

Celestial Events

This July 4 marks Earth’s
farthest distance, the aphelion, from the sun. We’ll be 94.5 million miles away
from the sun, about 3.1 million miles further than at perihelion which occurred
on January 2. The sun is now rising one minute later and setting one minute
earlier every day.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Todd and Chris
Williams in Minocqua sent me a series of photographs of a young barred owl that
they observed on the ground outside their front door.It likely had either fallen out of its nest
or had experienced an aborted first flight experience. Todd noted in his email
that “as I was taking these pictures, mama (or papa) was giving me the evil eye
and telling me in no uncertain terms to leave its baby alone. I was even dive
bombed a couple times. Once the baby walked, climbed and flapped its way up the
tree, we watched it all day outside our second floor bathroom window. The next
morning it was gone and we've not seen it since.”

I was unaware
that a barred owl chick could climb a tree, but Todd’s pictures clearly show it
hitching its way up a tree. Further research revealed that the young climb
trees by grasping the bark by their beak, then walking up the trunk while flapping
their wings.

photos by Todd Williams

The flightless
chicks leave the nest at at four to five weeks of age, dropping to the ground
and climbing a nearby tree to perch, whereupon the parents continue to feed
them until they are four to five months old. The young begin to molt into their
adult plumage at around six weeks of age and begin attempting short flights
around 10 weeks of age. They actually won’t attain their full adult plumage
until they are five to six months old.

It’s Snowing Cotton-grass

On a recent drive through Powell
Marsh on Hwy. 47, the marsh appeared to be covered in snow. Instead, the snow
effect was the results of thousands of cotton-grasses (Eriophorum) all in flower. Seven species of cotton-grass appear in
Wisconsin. All are found in bogs, and all produce cottony flower heads.

Sightings: Chickadee Nest, Crane
Display, Whimbrel

Sarah Krembs
sent me a fine photo of a pair of chickadees in Minocqua that were feeding
caterpillars to their chicks in their cavity nest. She went back a few days
later to see the chickadees, and the parents were again bringing caterpillars,
but “then all of a sudden they were both up in the trees doing their warning ‘chick
a dee dee dee dee’; very agitated. Then, I saw the hawk the chickadees had
obviously spotted way before I did sitting on a dead log not very far away. The
chickadees communicated something to each other and they both vanished but NOT
into the hole for the nest. I imagine they didn't want to draw attention to the
nest with a predator there. I yelled at the hawk and it sort of lazily flew
off. I waited for the parents to return, and eventually they did. Birds are so
smart and master multi-taskers, don't you think?”

photo by Sarah Krembs

Callie
and I witnessed a distraction display put on by a sandhill crane on Powell
Marsh, a behavior we’d never seen before from a crane. We were walking one of
the dikes when we noticed a crane walking parallel to us in the tall marsh
grasses. It was just a bit ahead of us, perhaps 100 feet to our side, and
walking rapidly. It seemed to us to be trying to draw our attention, which it
surely succeeded in doing! A little later when we returned the same way, it
flew from the marsh and landed in front of us, again walking rapidly and
flapping its wings. While it didn’t feign a broken wing like a killdeer might,
or like numerous species of ducks do, it was obviously trying to lead us away
from where we presume her chicks were hiding.

Tom
Folsom gave me a call on 6/6, saying there was large bird with a long decurved
bill wandering about on one of his cranberry marsh dikes in Manitowish Waters.
Mary and I quickly took a drive out there, and soon found a whimbrel, a curlew
species that nests in the Arctic tundra. Whimbrels are occasionally seen in
Wisconsin during their migration, but are a rare treat in our area.

whimbrel photo by Mary Burns

Shrubs in Flower

Shrubs
currently in flower include nannyberry, highbush cranberry, blueberry, and
various dogwoods. Nannyberries (Vibernum
lentago) get overlooked in our area, but provide an excellent crop of
berries for many mammals and birds including ruffed grouse, cedar waxwings,
brown thrashers, red fox, and white-tailed deer. Nannyberries also serve as the larval host for the spring azure
butterfly. For those who
like to forage, I’ve read that the berries
are edible and can be used to make jams and jellies, but I’ve never tried them.

nanny berry photo by John Bates

“Clean” Woods

I’ve recently noticed a number of
forest understories that have been “cleaned up” by their owners – in other
words, denuded of all understory plants. Some people refer to this as “German
forestry.” The likely motivation of such extensive ground clearing is to
improve airflow and thus reduce mosquito habitat. I get that – mosquitoes are
particularly tough to deal with in June – and this can help a bit.

There
are, however, major tradeoffs in managing a woodland to look like a park.
Foremost is the loss of habitat for a large array of wildlife species. Numerous
birds nest on the ground in forests including species like ruffed grouse, wild
turkeys, and many, many songbirds. One of my favorite songbirds is the very
vocal ovenbird, a warbler species that builds its nest on a vertical plane
rather than horizontal so that the adults enter it like an oven. The ovenbird’s
insistent, loud song – “teacher, teacher, teacher, TEACHER” – resonates
throughout most of our forested lands in the Northwoods.

Another favorite ground-nester is the hermit thrush,
whose song has been likened to listening to the opening of a grand overture.

Many mammals, from small prey
species to larger predators, den in or on the ground, with the primary
requirement of having suitable cover to conceal their locations.

The list goes on, from various
butterflies that utilize the understory plants to a host of other invertebrates
who use plants and woody debris for cover and food.

So, for property owners, there are
always choices to be made as to how one manages the land. Management always
comes down to what one values and what role we wish to play in the natural
world. I’m an advocate for natural random order in forest understories, but no
management strategy will support all species and all desires. Leopold wrote: “I
have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few
myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen but with an
axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while
deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with
each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

Celestial Events – Summer Solstice!

Summer solstice occurs on 6/20,
giving us our longest day of the year – 15 hours and 45 minutes. The sun rises
at 5:08 a.m. and sets at 8:53 p.m. The sunrise and sunset are also at their
northernmost points in our sky and now begin to swing back south.

The full moon – the “strawberry”
moon – also occurs on 6/20, and is the year’s southernmost moonrise.

For planet watching, look after dark
on 6/11 for Jupiter 1.5 degrees north of the waxing crescent moon.